Monday, March 11, 2013

Union's Desperate Gambit to Stymie Rebel Ram Buying in Great Britain

John Murray Forbes, left, and William H. Aspinwall were given millions of dollars to outbid the Confederacy for the two rams being built at the Laird Shipyard in Birkenhead in Great Britain. (Forbes picture from Harvard Square Library. org and Aspinwall picture from Panama Rail. org)

John Murray
Forbes was feeling “half ill” and trying to rest in his Milton, Massachusetts,
home on Saturday March 14, 1863.But resting
was soon out of the question when the railroad magnate and a member of one of
New England’s leading maritime families received a “brief telegram” from
Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase. The secretary wanted to meet with him the
next day at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Manhattan. Forbes, a man who once served
tea to John Brown, “could not refuse” and hurried to New York.
Without being explicitly told why the meeting was on such short notice, he
likely knew it concerned frightening reports on Confederate buying of advanced,
powerful warships in Europe.

With Chase, an
ardent abolitionist, that day was Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, the founder of
Hartford, Connecticut, Evening Press, and the New York-based William H.
Aspinwall, the owner of the lucrative gold-hauling Pacific Mail Steamship
Company and the builder of the trans-Panama railroad.

While not
friends, the four were acquainted with each other.Forbes and Aspinwall came from tightly-knit
Yankee families that pioneered America’s China trade of tea, silk, and opium. Welles
and Forbes met each other during the ill-fated Peace Convention in Washington
in early 1861. That winter, Aspinwall
had been in Washington discussing a plan with the Buchanan administration and
the incoming Lincoln administration to relieve Fort Sumter. He met Forbes then.
(1)

When war came
in April, Forbes peppered Chase with ideas on how to finance the conflict. His
suggestions on taxes and long-and short-term bonds, and short-term Treasury
notes for unexpected expenses, were largely ignored. Aspinwall fired off his
missives on graft in Navy acquisition to Welles and the energetic Gustavus V.
Fox, assistant secretary, with little effect

But Welles, on
the other hand, used both men to launch the Navy’s war against the Confederacy.They were in the front ranks chartering and
buying steamers to blockade Southern ports and to chase down Confederate
commerce raiders.

On their own, Forbes,
staunch Republican, and Aspinwall, long-time admirer of the cashiered George
McClellan, rallied men like themselves
into Union Leagues to back the war effort – politically and economically. They
also launched Loyal Publication Societies to boost the Union cause. Forbes also
threw himself into raising volunteer regiments in Massachusetts, including
black troops. Certainly, three of the men in the room – Welles, Forbes, and
Aspinwall – saw the United States as a naval power, but one facing the gravest
threat in its history from the sea. The fourth man, Chase, had the money to
eliminate that threat, the Confederate European shopping spree for oceangoing
ironclads.

As Fox wrote
to Forbes, “We have not a port in the North that can resist an ironclad over
very moderate power.” (2)

The Union Navy
had escaped disaster in Hampton Roads the year before when John Ericsson’s Monitor stalemated the iron-plated,
slant-roofed CSS Virginia. They won
reprieves later that spring when CSS
Virginia was scuttled because its draft was too deep to make it safely to
Richmond, and Captain David Farragut’s flotilla rushed past the still
unfinished ironclads on the Mississippi River to capture the Confederacy’s
busiest port and largest city New Orleans.

A desperate
Congress authorized letters of marque to seize blockade runners bringing war
materiel to the South. Even as the blockade tightened, Ulysses Grant marveled
at the quality and quantity of the European-made rifles the Confederates
carried at Vicksburg.But letters of marque
were worthless pieces of paper in keeping European-built ironclads taking to
sea for the South. (3)

The Union Army
fared even worse on the land. The summertime fears of Washington under siege
for the second time in two years had been palpable. After Second Manassas, “the rebels again look upon the dome of the
Capitol,” and the fears barely ebbed after the Battle of Antietam. Robert E.
Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia were still in fighting form. The two politically-driven,
grand Union advances launched in early winter had faltered. The Army of the
Potomac was again in disarray following the fiasco at Fredericksburg in
December.The Army of the Cumberland had
held its own a little later that month at Stones River in Tennessee, but with
enormous casualties.

The war
weariness in the North that cost the Republicans a number of governorships and
reduced their ranks in Congress was contagious.

Changing war
aims from restoring the Union, an ideal that Aspinwall embraced, to freeing the
slaves in states in rebellion, an ideal that Forbes blessed, proved more
popular in Europe than in many parts of the North. More fodder for the
opposition. Democrats rubbed their hands together in anticipation of the 1864
elections.

The historian
Charles Francis Adams Jr. characterized that time as “that darkest hour before
the slowly breaking dawn” of Union victories as Vicksburg and Gettysburg. (4)

Now with the
military campaign season on land fast approaching and with each arriving
steamer and mail packet from Great Britain delivering more disturbing news
about Confederate successes in building commerce raiders – like Alabama and Florida and frightening reports from Liverpool of mysterious
activities at the innovative Laird Brothers shipyard, the four agreed these
were desperate times requiring bold actions.

Before the
meeting Forbes had suggested to Fox that the United States should do everything
in its power to buy these new Laird ironclads at Birkenhead. In Forbes’ scheme,
the move would be made by a “merchant untrammeled by naval constructors and
such nuisance” in the name of “Siam or China.” Subterfuge and false fronts
werehow the Confederates’ did it, why
not take a play out of their book? (5)

In Washington,
Fox liked the idea. Thinking along the same lines in London was the United
States consul Freeman H. Morse.His
subterfuges and fronts would be “Russian, Italian or other foreign houses.” Morse
proved invaluable as events were soon to show. (6)

Although Chase
paid scant heed to Forbes’ ideas on financing the war, he and Welles let the
two businessmen come up with their own statement of purpose of what they were
to do with the $10 million set aside for this effort. Their primary target was “the most dangerous
vessels,” the Birkenhead rams, the men agreed. The second point was to do this as
surreptitiously as possible.Don’t
compromise the administration or Charles Francis Adams, the American minister
in London and Forbes’ longtime friend, in the effort “to prevent the sailing of
Confederate ships.” The “deniability” approach did not apply to Morse and his
counterpart in Liverpool, Thomas Haines Dudley. The men on the scene were integral to the plan as it was sketched
out in the hotel room and as it evolved in Europe. (7)